Hacker News: dmethvin

New comment by dmethvin in "Reddit Doubles Down"

dmethvin — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:58:25 +0000

Enshittification. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

New comment by dmethvin in "Graphics Programming Black Book (1997)"

dmethvin — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 23:32:05 +0000

Okay, I'll take a little time to brag. The word count challenge here got my interest at the time, so I whipped up an assembly language version of it and iterated several times, trying to figure out the value of switching different registers. In the end, I took second place:

https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book/blob/4028269f...

However, there's an interesting story behind this story. David Stafford, who came in first, posted that he thought he had the fastest solution and bet $100 that nobody could beat it. I posted my code which was significantly faster, and David tweaked it further to eventually win the challenge. Like a true person of honor, he did pay the $100 and I cashed his check.

New comment by dmethvin in "The Languages Which Almost Became CSS"

dmethvin — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 22:57:17 +0000

> If CSS was designed the way it is just to satisfy the constraints of 1996, then maybe that gives us permission 20 years later to do things a little differently.

Yeah, just like we can choose which side of the road to drive on or pick any arbitrary character encoding for an 8-bit byte.

New comment by dmethvin in "Issue 914451: Autofill does not respect autocomplete="off""

dmethvin — Sun, 13 Oct 2019 16:07:52 +0000

This has a lot of really serious implications. I built a form for a charity that allowed users to buy a subscription but include an additional donation amount. Chrome was sometimes filling that field with the two-digit year. The charity got a lot of complaints and it ruined the trust relationship with the donors who didn't understand what was happening and thought it was intentional.

New comment by dmethvin in "Google AMP lowered our page speed, and there's no choice but to use it"

dmethvin — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 00:48:07 +0000

AMP is just a set of conventions and limitations that, when followed, make for a fast site. Anyone can make a fast site if they follow similar rules. Most sites don't do that because either the developers want to use something that's "nicer" to code but a lot bigger, or because the marketing department insists on loading 12 different tracking and analytics progams--when they probably only use one or two.

New comment by dmethvin in "Ask HN: Is all programming constantly changing or just front-end JavaScript?"

dmethvin — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 17:40:45 +0000

Yes, things are changing rapidly everywhere on the stack, but it seems that with front-end dev the same two things are left behind with each generation: performance and accessibility.

Each time we get close to making performant and accessible web sites easy for mortals to develop, some major disruption in the force occurs and well-crafted solutions no longer work in the new environment. So people reinvent them, poorly, and it takes another four or five years before things catch up.

I think many designers and developers prioritize their own needs or preferences and fail to advocate for what users really want. No user wants a web site or app to take 10 seconds to load on their phone, yet most do. Users don't care if your app is written in React, Angular, or served from a WordPress site. They just want to be able to use it.

New comment by dmethvin in "Show HN: Mosaic – A declarative, front-end JavaScript library for building UIs"

dmethvin — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 11:53:06 +0000

I wasn't able to find any working examples from the homepage, even with the updated link. Can you link directly to a demo page or two that uses the library, rather than a Github repo with code that uses the library?

New comment by dmethvin in "Browsers"

dmethvin — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 02:27:20 +0000

I don't think they want control over the browser market, just the browser users on Windows. People are less likely to ditch Edge if it is more compatible with the way Chrome and Safari work (including the ability to run Chrome extensions). That means they have more visibility and control over those users.

New comment by dmethvin in "The Major Urban Revolution of Minor Transportation Means"

dmethvin — Sun, 16 Sep 2018 16:35:48 +0000

It's important to express the underlying reasoning for the policy: things with similar size and speed can be together, dissimilar things should be separated. Cars and bikes/scooters are not the same, and streets need to separate them via dedicated lanes. If not, those users are going to choose sidewalks as the lesser of two dangers.

New comment by dmethvin in "C++ Just My Code Stepping in Visual Studio"

dmethvin — Sun, 01 Jul 2018 17:48:19 +0000

The Microsoft Edge browser has had this feature for two or three years, by the same name. Chrome has something similar.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/devtools-gui...

New comment by dmethvin in "How I Automated My Job"

dmethvin — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 03:19:08 +0000

Quite often you have to manually do the task at least once to determine how to automate it. That tells you your upper bound on how much time can be saved.

If for example it only took 15 minutes of manual work it's highly unlikely that the payback of automation would occur any time soon. That's especially true because the 2nd or 3rd time there may be different special cases and you'd have to go back and change your automation.

New comment by dmethvin in "Ask HN: What would you have asked Mark Zuckerburg?"

dmethvin — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 21:38:23 +0000

Why did you hire a psychologist from the company that inappropriately disclosed data to Cambridge Analytica?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/18/facebook-cambri...

New comment by dmethvin in "How and why we moved to Vue.js"

dmethvin — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 15:20:15 +0000

I completely agree that you can do a lot with jQuery or even plain DOM and JS. It's often the right way to go when there's already back-end structure like Wordpress, Drupal, or ASP.NET and you just need simple things like form validation.

The benefit that frameworks offer is exactly that structure that jQuery doesn't provide (and was never designed to provide). A long-lived SPA needs good structure. If you aren't good at understanding how to create it yourself a framework can save a LOT of work.

New comment by dmethvin in "A Letter from the Publisher of Nautilus"

dmethvin — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 14:01:38 +0000

Here's the 990: http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pdf_archive/463/4634857...

See the bottom of PDF page 8 under Independent Contractors and the bottom of page 27. Note that p27 is NOT saying that all that money went to John Steele, just that he is an interested person in the transaction.

It looks to me like "Nautilus Ventures" is a for-profit that actually publishes and the non-profit pays that entity. All the operating expenses are there so the 990 doesn't really tell you what they spent.

New comment by dmethvin in "iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages"

dmethvin — Wed, 20 Dec 2017 01:17:24 +0000

That would cost Apple a lot if those people had Apple Care. Better for Apple if the minority people who perceive a problem come in and ask for a replacement/

New comment by dmethvin in "Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea"

dmethvin — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 14:06:04 +0000

I agree with your premise but the example problem already has many established companies including Engaging Networks, EveryAction, Salsa, and Luminate. As a startup your job will either be to completely replace their stack in one fell swoop (VERY hard as a startup with no track record) or to somehow integrate in with the existing stack and eventually push it out (also hard but doable).

New comment by dmethvin in "Turning Off GitHub Issues (2016)"

dmethvin — Tue, 23 May 2017 22:13:13 +0000

This is from a year ago.

As someone who wants to contribute to a project for the first time, there would be nothing more frustrating than spending time creating what I think is a good pull request, only to have it be turned down (which it will be).

Issues help new contributors and repo veterans determine whether it's worth the extra effort to create a pull request. The problem with low-quality issues needs to be addressed by automation and filters, which GitHub hasn't done yet.

New comment by dmethvin in "Bad SSL"

dmethvin — Sat, 18 Mar 2017 12:52:21 +0000

He might think otherwise because it climbed to the top of HN but doesn't have any explanation (here or on the actual page) of what it does or who/what it might be useful for.

New comment by dmethvin in "Galaxy Note7: What We Discovered"

dmethvin — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 02:00:48 +0000

Corrosion from leaking electrolyte would eventually short the battery terminals to the protective shield around the battery cells. At that point the battery would catch fire. It just happened to me 3 months ago, 2002 Prius on a battery that was serviced for the recall in 2004. Electrolyte continued to leak, obviously. :/ https://twitter.com/davemethvin/status/782610209525170176

New comment by dmethvin in "Add-ons in 2017"

dmethvin — Thu, 24 Nov 2016 17:47:17 +0000

It's quite a burden to maintain two different sets of APIs.